Public Engagement

Manhattan Bridge

Our department is proud to support faculty who bring their historical expertise to current events, bridging the academic and the popular, and engaging wide audiences on topical issues. Here is a sampling of how our work has appeared in the public sphere.

Public Health and Environment

• Op-ed commenting by Chris Sellers for the Jewish Journal: The Supreme Court’s Environmental Legacy Was Tarnished Even Before Barrett

• Interview with Nancy Tomes for CBS News: Responses to the uses of masks during the pandemics of 1918

• Op-ed by Shobana Shankar for The Conversation: " What the US Could Learn About Vaccination from Nigeria"

• Interview with Chris Sellers for The Washington Post: "Pruitt is Bringing Back Memories of the EPA's Most Tumultous Era"

• Profile of Jared Farmer by the Chronicle Review: "The Tree Whisperer"

• Op-ed by Jared Farmer in the Los Angeles Times: "Slow Trees and Climate Change"

• Review of Nancy Tomes's Remaking the American Patient in the premier U.S. health policy journal, Health Affairs

• Review of Remaking the American Patient by a leading doctor writing for the health section of the New York Times

• Op-ed by Chris Sellers for CNN: "Lead Threatens Health of Millions of Americans"

• Explainer by Chris Sellers for The Conversation: "Piping as Poison: The Flint Water Crisis and America's Toxic Infrastructure"

• Interview with Chris Sellers on Michigan NPR: "Why Cities Like Flint Transport Water Using Pipes Made with a Poison"

• Blog roundtable edited by Chris Sellers: "The Flint Water Crisis"

• Nancy Tomes interviewed by Popular Science: "Ebola: How Pop Culture and Infotainment Flame Our Fear"

• Shobana Shankar interviewed by the World Science Festival on infectious disease in West Africa

• Op-ed by Joshua Teplitsky for the Jewish Daily Forward: "Jewish History's Lesson for Handling Ebola"

• Nancy Tomes appears as a "talking head" in the PBS documentary The Forgotten Plague: Tuberculosis in America

• Op-ed by Chris Sellers for Dissent: "How Industrial Hazards Get Overlooked"

• Paul Gootenberg interviewed about the war on drugs for the leading Brazilian periodical on the history of health and science

Religion and Culture

• Essay by Sara Lipton for the New York Review of Books: Life, Death, and the Levys

• Profile of April Masten in The American Scholar: "So You Think You Can Dance"

• Interview with Jennifer Anderson on politics of tea in Early America podcast

• Essay by Sara Lipton on anti-Semitic imagery and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

• Interview with Sara Lipton for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's "Voices on Antisemitism" podcast

• Essay by Sara Lipton for the New York Review of Books: "The First Anti-Jewish Caricature?"

• Essay by Sara Lipton for the New York Review of Books: "Books of Jewish Beauty"

• Op-ed by Sara Lipton for the New York Times: "The Words That Killed Medieval Jews"

• Essay by Sara Lipton for the Jewish Chronicle: "Creating the Stereotyped Root of Evil"

• Essay by Sara Lipton for the New York Review of Books: "The Invention of the Jewish Nose"

• Q&A at Religion Dispatches with Sara Lipton about her book Dark Mirror

• Essay by Sara Lipton for Huffington Post: "All That Is Godly Must Glitter"

• Free educational e-book by Jared Farmer: The Image of Mormons: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Students

• Free educational e-book by Jared Farmer: Mormons in the Media, 1830–2012

• Q&A at Religion Dispatches with Jared Farmer about his book On Zion's Mount

Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.

•Professor Robert Chase is a contributor to the NPR podcast entitled "Criminal Justice During Protest and Pandemic."

•Rob Chase co-authored a piece with grad student Yalile Suriel in the African American Intellectual Historical Society's (AAIHS) essay blog "Black Perspectives."

• Review essay by Robert Chase for Boston Review: "Slaves of the State: Prison Uprisings and Lessons of Attica"

• Op-ed by Robert Chase for CNN: "How Can We End the Cycle of Racial Violence?"

• On C-SPAN, Lori Flores talks about the history of Mexican-American civil rights

• Op-ed by Lori Flores for the Detroit Free Press: "Legal Loopholes Put Lives of Migrant Workers at Risk"

• The Farm Report on the Heritage Radio Network interviews Lori Flores about her book Grounds for Dreaming

• On the blog of the Organization for American Historians, Lori Flores answers questions about Grounds for Dreaming

• On the blog of the Organization for American Historians, Robert Chase discusses the prisoners' rights movement

• The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC interviews Robert Chase on the Charleston church shooting

• The Berliner Zeitung interviews Robert Chase about race, violence, and the Confederate flag

• ON MSNBC, Robert Chase discuss the history of the Confederate flag

• Op-ed by Robert Chase for CNN: "Confederate Flag Deserves History's Harsh Verdict"

• On the the TV news show Fresh Outlook, Lori Flores talks about U.S. immigration policy

• On the the TV news show Fresh Outlook, Robert Chase talks about race and policing after Ferguson

• Op-ed by Robert Chase for CNN: "Where Are America's Memorials to Pain of Slavery, Black Resistance?"

• Op-ed by Robert Chase for Orlando Sentinel: "Gun Laws and Race in Florida: Numbers Show We Aren't Safe"

International Affairs

• Op-ed by Jennifer Anderson for Fortune Magazine on Hurricane Irma's Impact on the Caribbean

• Blog post by Paul Gootenberg: "Peru's 'New' Drug Strategy: Déjà Vu?"

• Op-ed by Chris Sellers for the New York Times: "Will the Next Deepwater Horizon Be in Mexico?"

• Eric Zolov talks about U.S-Cuban relations on the TV news show Fresh Outlook

• Op-ed by Eric Zolov for Huffington Post: "Let's Revisit Helms-Burton"

• Op-ed by Eric Zolov for Zócalo: "Buddies Across the Border: Does the United States Have a 'Special Relationship' with Mexico?"

• Op-ed by Chris Sellers for Dissent: "The Environmental Consequences of Privatizing Mexico's Oil"

• Blog roundtable edited by Chris Sellers: "Chernobyl at Thirty"

• Op-ed by Shobana Shankar for the London School of Economics: "Long Before Boko Haram, Dissenters Were Driven to the Brink in Northern Nigeria"

• Shobana Shankar interviewed about the Boko Haram in Nigeria by Radio Študent (Slovenia)

• Press release about Paul Gootenberg's research: "U.S. Drug Plague of 1980s Was Spurred by Earlier Interventions in Andes"

• Interview with Paul Gootenberg about his book Andean Cocaine for ROROTOKO

• Interview with Paul Gootenberg about Andean Cocaine for Página/12 (Buenos Aires, Agentina)

• Interview with Paul Gootenberg about Andean Cocaine for The Clinic (Santiago, Chile)

• Column about Andean Cocaine in La República (Lima, Peru)

Popular Culture

• Paul Gootenberg interviewed about the Netflix series Narcos for BBC Brasil

• Lori Flores reviews HBO for PopMatters: "Did True Detective Do Justice to Latino California?"

• Jared Farmer reviews Broadway for Religion Dispatches: "Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) Is Awesomely Lame"

• Shirley Lim talks to Leonard Lopate on WNYC about Anna May Wong and "flapper chic"

• Eric Zolov for NPR's Alt.Latino on "Shakers and Mockers: Uruguay's Place in Latin Rock History"

• Eric Zolov for NPR's Alt.Latino on "Traffic Sound: Peruvian Protest Psychedelia"

• Eric Zolov for NPR's Alt.Latino on "Peru’s Overlooked Place in the History of Latin American Rock"

• Eric Zolov for NPR's Alt.Latino on "Los Jaivas: How the Band Tried to Mend a Broken Chile in the 1970s"

• Eric Zolov for NPR's Alt.Latino on "Cuban Rock and the Revolution"—Part 1 and Part 2

• Eric Zolov for NPR's Alt.Latino on "A Continuing History of Rock in Latin America: Why Sing It in English?"—Part 1 and Part 2